Beijing Pages

Some of Sean McKinnon's pictures

I was lucky to do some sightseeing before the Olympics began, but once they started (and my camera broke), that was it for my days as a tourist. Sean McKinnon writes the software that drives our comms gear, and has been on hand to support NBC at the Olympics since Atlanta in 1996. In Beijing he worked an overnight shift, so made time for sightseeing in the early afternoons. He was lucky enough to have good weather on the day he went to the Summer Palace in Beijing.

First, meet Sean. He's pictured here with Kunming Lake & Longevity Hill behind him.

Below are some more views of the Summer Palace, starting with the Seventeen Arch Bridge.

Royalty used to come here to escape the summer heat, but this is still right in Beijing.

More of Sean's pictures:
The Fuwa are the 5 mascots of the 2008 Summer Olympics. They appear at events, and in the Olympic Park, as seen here near the Water Cube.

Beijing has been called the City of Bicycles, and there are a lot of them. Sean took this shot one afternoon when he took a wrong turn on his way back to the Media Village where he was staying. Bikes as far as the eye can see.

The International Broadcast Centre is where NBC and the other broadcasters who have the rights to broadcast the games in their countries set up their operations. Although NBC significantly downsized it's 2008 operation, we still take up the largest amount of space of all the broadcasters.
Our transmission area, through which all inbound and outbound signals pass are pictured below. First inbound

then outbound.

Here's one of our control rooms, Control B.

This is our comms rack, now pared down from 20 racks for Torino in 2006, to 10 racks for Beijing. That's a sign of the technological progress that's been made in just the last 2 years.

What does the inside of the IBC look like? Here are a couple shots.

CCTV, the major broadcaster in China, which is government-owned, is the Olympic rights-holder for China. They have almost 20 channels of programming. In this picture, taken on the 3rd night of the Olympics, a group of IBC volunteers & workers are camped outside of CCTV's studios at the IBC. They're watching the Men's Basketball game between China & the United States. U.S. won, 101-70.